eFiction India eFiction India Vol.02 Issue.09 | Page 34

33

STORIES

THE MOSQUITO
SOLDIER
    SAMYA GHOSAL                                   

Samya Ghosal is a student of
Mechanical Engineering at NIT
Durgapur, currently in his 3rd year.
He spends most of his time writing,
reading novels, and comicbooks,
watching serious cinema, and sketching. He spends his nights roaming
around the campus, hiding from the
guards and doing graffiti on the walls.
His favorite authors are Albert Camus,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Kurt Vonnegut,
William Gibson, George Orwell and
many more. He has previously written
reviews for various graphic novels at
Striptease – The Magazine.

O

NE OF THE insects bites the
septum. Jolt. Awake. Asleep,
they crawl again, another bite,
awake. Awake now.
Inhale
Exhale
Deep and intense
Forget
Forgotten everything
Sweet soothing insects crawling out of nostrils
Asleep
He was a soldier on a watch tower. His unit
had taken refuge in the ruins of an ancient
city. The tower was tall with a sharp tip,
like a spike sprouting from the ground and
shouting silence. He was the night-watch.
The tower provided a three hundred and
sixty degree view. The landscape around
him was motionless; nothing stirred, like
a painting. It had a sporadic distribution
of giant rocks and hills, enough dark crevices for the enemy to hide. It was a barren
desert. The night sky was like a dirty, dark
pane of glass. The stone and metal ruins
lay scattered around like numerous broken
pieces of dice. His unit was asleep, not
many awake.
The city was called Taxopolis in the ancient
times. Its residents used to worship giants

eFiction India | June 2014

who roamed the Earth, stepping on things.
Things